Anita Lillie's Masters Thesis at the MIT Media Lab

Argh, getting back to normalcy now, much later than I’d anticipated. I’ve been in Austin and Taiwan, then back to Boston, over the last couple of weeks, and although I’ve been busy, it hasn’t been with thesis-related stuff specifically.

But now, I’m back to work for good, ready to crank hard and consistently until I finish in May.

Today I met Takuya Fujishima, of Yamaha, and talked with him about soundsieve and my thesis project. He’s a very interesting guy, completely on top of the work going on in MIR — he specifically mentioned Paul (Lamere) and Elias Pampalk when I was talking to him about my project. He also suggested I look into the work of these Japanese researchers:

Masataka Goto — worked with Elias Pampalk on MusicSun and MusicRainbow

This is certainly a good start in getting back to reading relevant papers. I’m definitely curious to know if there are must-read papers/people that I should take a look at. I’m interested in these topics specifically:

interfaces for music browsing and recommendation

multidimensional analysis

audio features that are commonly used to discriminate between different styles/genres

projects that combine audio analysis with contextual descriptors

commentary on what makes an “appropriate” music database (how to have it as unbiased as possible?)

interface design for 3D spaces

I found these lists of MIR-related papers/dissertations, and will look through them:

Masataka’s music interfaces are extremely nice – very approachable, even by non-tech folk.

One good resource on music visualizations is Stephan Baumann. He gave an excellent tutorial at ISMIR a few years back on music visualizations – it is getting a little dated, but still worth a look. You can find the slides here: